Six weeks ago, the Gonzo Scientist challenged researchers around the world to interpret their Ph.D. research in dance form, film the dance, and share it with the world on YouTube (Science, 10 October, p. 186). By the 11 p.m. deadline this past Sunday, 36 dances--including solo ballet and circus spectacle--had been submitted online. A panel of nine judges--the three winners of the first "Dance Your Ph.D." contest, three scientists from Harvard University, and three artistic directors of the dance company Pilobolus--scored the dances on their ability to bridge the art and science worlds. Today, Science announces the winners of the 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest in four categories: Graduate Students, Postdocs, Professors, and Popular Choice:
Graduate Students
Sue Lynn Lau chose classical ballet and highly kinetic party
dancing as the way to interpret her Ph.D. thesis, "The role of
vitamin D in beta-cell function." As The Nutcracker Suite
lilts in the background, Lau, a graduate student from the Garvan
Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, appears as the
Sugarplum Fairy, delivering marshmallow glucose to four beta cell
dancers. Meanwhile, a fifth dancer flings and twirls around the
stage--representing the sunlight required for vitamin D
biosynthesis.
Postdocs
The raw material for Miriam Sach's solo contemporary dance was her
2004 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany,
titled "Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of
regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography: A
comparison between single subject and group analysis." The question
behind her research was whether different types of verbs are
processed by different regions of the brain. Sach, now a
neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, embodied
this difference by dancing in the various styles of processing:
awkward and hunched for the irregular verbs and graceful and limber
for the regular verbs.
Professors
Vince LiCata, a biochemist at Louisiana State University, Baton
Rouge, won this category with the help of his graduate students.
The foursome danced a slow and graceful double pas de deux,
representing the interaction of pairs of hemoglobin molecules from
his 1990 Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. thesis, "Resolving Pathways
of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low
Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids." To
study these molecules, LiCata had to cool them down and take
pictures of them, a technique that was mirrored onstage by a
long-bearded Old Man Winter periodically running by and pouring
Styrofoam frost as another dancer ran by and snapped a shot of the
proceedings.
Popular Choice
The winner of the Popular Choice category was determined by the
number of views accumulated by each YouTube video between the time
it went online and the contest deadline. Markita Landry, a
half-Bolivian, half-French Canadian physics Ph.D. student at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was the clear winner with
14,138 views; views for the rest ranged from 10,000 to fewer than
100 for the last-minute entries. (It didn't hurt that Landry was
the first to enter the contest.) Landry used a tango to convey her
thesis, "Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA
Complexes." She is trying to understand how a protein called TelK
bends DNA into hairpin loops. The mechanism makes for beautiful
dance, with Landry bending like pliable DNA in her partner's
arms.
So what does everyone win? Each will be paired with a professional choreographer this week, and together they will attempt to translate a scientific paper the researcher has authored into a dance. Then the four choreographers--all of whom are based in Chicago--will create a single four-part performance based on the papers. In February 2009, the winning scientists will be guests of honor at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago, where, on 13 February, they will have front-row seats to the world debut of THIS IS SCIENCE, a professional dance interpretation of their published research.
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